Chest Design 1935 - 1942

Etna Wiswall made this ‘Chest Design’ with watercolour and graphite. You can see that for Wiswall, artmaking is an open process. What grabs me here is the colour palette and the feeling of a story being told through decoration. There's the salmon pink background with the cobalt blue, and the way the colours bleed slightly into each other. All these decorative motifs, like the horse or the church, are painted with such care, it's almost as if each tiny mark is a word in a visual poem. Notice the way the horse is painted with such graphic simplicity, yet it still manages to convey so much movement. It reminds me a little of the work of Henri Rousseau, especially in the way both artists share a similar sense of naivety and wonder, creating worlds that feel both familiar and dreamlike at the same time.